Etymologically, the word "anthology" means a bundle of
flowers. During the late medieval period, monks made collections of
favorite texts for their own use or for members of their orders. Private
collections offer satisfactions, as you can see among people who collect
stamps or coins or, well, you name it and you can find somebody who
collects whatever you've named. Anthropologists speak of
"hunter-gatherer" societies, and it's easy enough to see hunting and
gathering as among the most basic human characteristics and impulses.
When keeping private collections does no harm, it's not something to
dismiss or look down upon. However, most people who make personal
collections want to share them. Last Christmas I received a CD and an
audio tape of seasonal music from friends who initially put them
together for their own use, then made additional copies as gifts. That I
received two such collections from people who didn't know each other,
suggests how many people turn such collections into presents. No matter
how dogmatic anthologies can get, the sense of gift is usually there
somewhere.

The sense of a gift seems an admirable editorial concept, and one
that should not get lost no matter how anthologies change through time.
Gifts often include hopes. Of course, gifts can act simply as bribes or
as a means of coercing, conning, or appeasing people. Yet the hopes in
gifts can even grow considerably from this simple form of transaction. A
gift given in courtship, for instance, may include hopes for relatively
quick and selfish gratification, but that doesn't necessarily exclude
hopes for cooperation and shared happiness over extended periods of
time.

Some of the most important anthologies published in recent centuries
have acted as news vehicles. This is not out of keeping with the
courtship theme: if you're in love, you want to tell the world. Aside
from amorous enthusiasm, real news is hard to keep to yourself. If
you've found something important, you'll probably want to tell people
about it. Even as I write the beginning of this essay, there are a
number of people I feel impatient to show it to.

News tends to stimulate a prescriptive impulse. Anthologies based in
news may begin with the implication that this is something you gotta see
to believe, but it will also tend to bring with it the implication that
this is what people should read. Likewise, controversial news
acts as a stimulant for debate and news of an atrocity asks people to
seek a remedy. Remedial anthologies can act as advocates for groups of
people or types of work that have previously been disenfranchised or
excluded. Just as easily, they can move in such a way as to negate what
some would see as news. Easily identifiable examples of these directions
can be found in collections of work by minorities and of work meant to
reestablish traditional forms and values.

The interrelation of inclusion and exclusion forms one of the basic
dynamics of the process of anthology formation. In a simple collection
of flowers, gatherers select the plants that they think look or smell
best or carry the right kind of symbolism. The gatherers may find plants
that might or might not be appropriate, and spend considerable time
deciding on which to keep and which to exclude. This tension can become
a dynamic force in the reading of anthologies as well as in their
assembly. Readers who seek what may have been left out become ideal
readers and extenders of the news in anthologies. As anthologies and the
environment in which they function become more complex, exclusion
becomes more important and can take on a negative role. This can grow
from the problems any editor finds in work that may or may not fit the
anthology's purposes. At times, some anthologists work primarily from
the need to exclude what they dislike rather than what they wish to
keep. Anthologies can thus become tools for something like
excommunication just as easily as they can act as vehicles for
enfranchisement.

Combining most of these elements, polemical anthologies can act as
much as stimulants for new work as surveys of what has been done.
Manifestos became something of an art form in themselves in the 20th
Century. Perhaps the most enduring manifestos may not be those limited
to a single rhetorical voice, but those which appeared as choruses in
the form of anthologies.

No matter how complex the impulse to anthologize becomes, it almost
invariably includes these elements, and to the editors, they become a
means of trying to make the environment in which they operate better
than it was before.

*

I saw my initial efforts at electronic publishing in a
limited and tentative context. The first works I put on-line were
Anarchist classics and a few poems, in the days when ftp, gopher, and
bbs were the main means of electronic distribution. When the World Wide
Web opened up to general use, it became clear to me that this would be
as good an environment as I could find for creating an anthology of the
poetry of the later decades of the 20th Century. Following nearly all
the lines of collection mentioned above, I set about trying to represent
as close to all the genres and tendencies of poetry produced during the
era in what gets called "experimental" or "Avant Garde" modes.

Several factors came from characteristics of the web itself. First,
it's nature made it open-ended in ways that print anthologies are not.
The ink never dries on the web. The most immediately gratifying aspect
of this comes to a print publisher from the fact that it allows you to
correct typos. I'm not sure how much people not involved in print
publishing understand how much misery these little fleas or heartaches
or pestilences can inflict on a printer-publisher, or how they add up
over the years. I didn't know it when I started on the web, but in the
electronic environment typos became less of a problem: readers take them
more or less for granted, and since they can always be corrected they
weigh less heavily on the publisher's psyche. Thus the web provides
liberation from an unwanted kind of permanence in two ways at once.

Lack of fixity fans out from there. Authors can revise and add to
work that they publish on-line. Unlike a print anthology, the editor
doesn't have to allot a certain amount of space to each contributor or
each work. In some instances, charges for disk space can become
expensive, but at least in its potential, web space is virtually
unlimited. Going by author, if the work of X seems to require several
hundred pages to make its point, the editor can include that much. You
don't have to assign each contributor a limited number of pages, or use
volume as a qualitative signifier in which the more prestigious authors
get more than those assigned a lower status. Volume as an indicator of
status disappears along with the worries about how to apportion limited
space.

On the web, which acts as a world wide distribution system in a
literal sense, there's no reason why you can't present work in multiple
languages, and you can add translations as you go along, not requiring
them to be on-hand by a specific deadline. If the presence of work on
the Web finds translators among readers, as it has done a number of
times at Light and Dust, so much the better. Like most editors, I know
more about what's going on in my own part of the world than anywhere
else. But the global environment of the Web allows considerable outreach
beyond that. The tendency toward expanded areas of possibility became
apparent in anthologies before the Web appeared, but the Web allows
considerably more room for exchange. Contributions from France and
Hungary, Paraguay and Eritrya don't simply make up addenda or footnotes
to my anthology, but take positions as important as anything else at the
site. My offering hardly represents everything that's going on in the
world, but it moves more fully toward an international scope than any
print anthology I know.

Criticism and commentary play an essential role in the poetry of the
era: given the diversity of work and the originality of much of what
interests me, it seems unlikely that all new work can be accessible to a
wide range of readers without commentary. Manifestos and theoretical
papers have assumed crucial positions in the 20th Century, some acting
as impetus for the creation of new work as well as commentary on it.
During recent years, writing of this sort has found its way more
prominently into print anthologies. At Light and Dust, I favored
criticism and commentary done by practicing artists, though I didn't
disqualify the work of scholars and critics who do not produce works of
art. This, too, is something that doesn't need to be complete by a given
deadline; it's something I could add as I went along. And, again, the
space for it is potentially unlimited, not something that requires a
trade-off between poetry and commentary.

Perhaps the most important internal feature of a web anthology's lack
of fixity is that no one is permanently and categorically excluded. This
is not the case with print anthologies. Once the ink dries, whomever is
excluded is cast permanently out of that particular garden. The sense of
exclusion in print anthologies can create problems ranging from a poet's
sense of lost opportunity to ferocious squabbling, back biting and other
forms of infighting, the flattering of editors, and the generation of
deep-seated and long lasting grudges. An anthology's finality can also
generate lack of credibility on the part of readers. In the web
environment, much of this simply disappears. If Dick and Jane aren't
part of the anthology today, they may be tomorrow; the need for
competition eases, and with a bit of luck, this may even lead to a
greater sense of cooperation rather than one-up- manship.

This expands further in the context of the Web as a whole. Dick and
Jane may very well be people who'd have to undergo something like a
Damascus Road conversion to appear at my site, and probably would have
to do so at about the time hell freezes over, but my site isn't the only
one on the web. If you don't find them at my site, you can probably find
them somewhere else using the same means you used to access Light and
Dust. If links don't take you where you want to go, search engines, for
all their weaknesses, may help. If Dick and Jane can't find anyone to
publish them on-line, nothing's stopping them from setting up a Web site
of their own. If they've been so far unrecognized, an environment like
that of the Web will certainly get them at least some attention, and
they may be able to build on that. However dogmatic any site may become,
if it's on the web it still potentially connects to all other sites. You
don't have to buy more books or check out other libraries: if you can
get to Light and Dust, you can get to any other public site on the Web.

My approach to poetry is eclectic, anti-hieratic, pluralistic, and
decentralized. Despite the use of the Web by totalitarian factions in
attempts to establish dominance, the Web has a tendency to resist this
kind of treatment. It may not always succeed, but it still provides the
means for subversion of any group claiming hegemony or seeking to form
an instant or pre-stacked canon. My site goes against the hegemonic
grain to the extent that some people have given it such nick names as
"the Resistance" and "Sweden, 1941." That's congenial to me and my way
of looking at things, but it doesn't come from a desire on my part to
overthrow orthodoxies in order to establish a new one in their place. I
see domineering cults as toxic to the general scene, and equally harmful
to individuals within the various citadels themselves. The rejection of
clique putsches doesn't equal a dismissal of all those inside the
various armed fortresses, and members of many of these cabals appear at
Light and Dust. When presented without the imperial trappings, armies of
Mooneyesque cheerleaders and draconian enforcers, the work of these
people can take on a greater life on its own terms.

With this anti-dogmatic precondition in mind, I have been able to put
forward work that has been ignored, marginalized, or abused. Perhaps the
most dramatic examples come from projects to put works on-line that have
been censored or otherwise kept out of print by force. But other work
that has suffered benign neglect seems just as important. There may be a
paradox or a bit of serendipity in this. I seem to be temperamentally
oriented toward certain types of rebellion, confrontation, and, as some
would see it, plain crankiness or contrariety. In a different milieu,
this might leave me in the position of backing those who had failed by
any standards, including my own. In the dispensation of the last
century, however, much of the best work I know has been bashed or
ignored. This makes it easy to simultaneously publish some of the best
work around and some of the most abused or neglected. As important as
this advocacy may be for me, it's by no means my only motivation nor
does it reflect the whole show. I have been able to put up work by
prominent and successful poets along with those who have been
marginalized.

When I first started the Light and Dust site, I had a definite sense
of the kind of work I wanted to include. Although there are plenty of
rip-off sites on the web, I've sought permission from all living and
most deceased writers or their publishers or their estates. I have
fudged a bit on a couple author photos when I could not locate the
photographers. On several occasions I have put up work by writers whom I
could not locate, asking them to get in touch with me, with the
understanding that I would take the work down if they so desired. Web
publishers who go beyond this, into the grab-what-you-can approach, do
not foster a cooperative environment, act as a severe violation of
authors' rights, and dirty the scene. To me, those of us who have
started early should set precedents for responsibility in the new
medium. I have been able to include about 70% of the poets who most
interested me by seeking permission from authors, their estates, or
their publishers. I don't know if I could have done better if I had
compiled a print anthology. As to plain volume of work, I have been able
to publish more than I could imagine including in print in my wildest
dreams. With an idea of what I wanted in the anthology, the selection
process didn't involve much exclusion, but rather concentrated on
obtaining permissions and working out technical problems. I have not
sought submissions, have not encouraged them, and have only used two
pieces that came "over the transom." The fact that I don't look for or
pay much attention to unsolicited work doesn't mean that I have simply
stuck to a program or filled in pre-determined slots. Much of the work
in the anthology came from the editorial colleagues who have worked with
me, and I discovered plenty of new work during the time I put the
anthology together.

Although I edited Light and Dust with clear goals in mind, I see
editing from a single point of view as, of necessity, limited -
certainly too limited for an environment as complex as the milieu in
which we find ourselves. As a partial means of getting around my
limitations, the Light and Dust complex includes dozens of co-editors in
its specialized sections, and I have at times asked third parties to
make selections of work by individuals in single entries. This approach
doesn't originate in the Web environment. I began moving in this
direction in 1970 with several Peoples Publishing programs. Shortly
after that, as Associate Editor of Margins magazine, I moved as far in
this direction as I could with a series of symposiums I sponsored, each
with a different editor, and each including multiple views of the
subject. Distinct advantages to this approach come from properties of
the Web. I can put work up in "sequesters" on-line, not linking them to
any menu, but giving those involved the specific URL so that we could
work together on whatever project we had in progress before it went
public. Of course, after entries link to menus, the web still leaves
plenty of room for revision and augmentation. I would not want to make
an anthology such as this without considerable input from people whose
expertise is greater than mine or whose opinions differ from my own. The
degree of input varied considerably from one project to another, often
depending on how much specific editors wanted to do themselves. In some
instances, sections were edited as a collaborative project; in others, I
stayed out of the editorial process entirely.

Making available work that is otherwise difficult to obtain has been
important to me, and in the presentation of complete books on the web I
have concentrated on two types: books that are now out of print, and
books which have existed in manuscript but have not been previously
published. With a number of the poets whose work appears at the site, I
have reproduced their early books complete, and included significant
examples of work done throughout their lives, providing in- depth
presentation of their development through their entire opus. Differing
publication strategies show work in different dimensions: one writer's
work may appear in large volume, another's may appear in the context of
related efforts, other's appear as brief suggestions. Each approach
implies that all work presented in one manner could also be seen from a
different angle: the work of any poet at the site could potentially be
considered in depth, or as a sketch, or as part of a regional or genre
frame of reference.

Of marginalized work in the 20th Century, the most thoroughly abused
and potentially valuable has been visual poetry. Some would see this as
a genre of its own. You can make a good case for that, and so some
editors and practitioners should. I see it in a different context, or
perhaps I should say a different set of contexts. Most art movements in
the century - from the Futurisms to Language Poetry, Vorticism to the
Beats, Dada to Fluxus - have first manifested themselves with a
concomitant exploration of the graphic potentials of language. As they
grew venal, this tendency was suppressed or relegated to a minor
position or used as a form of coopting other movements. Concrete Poetry
acted as a minor wing of Fluxus, and that is the type of visual poetry
most familiar to the largest number of readers. But the tendency has
never been captured or owned by any one movement; instead, it has run
through virtually all others in one form or another. Most movements in
their creative phase have sought to transcend boundaries of culture and
language and to try to tap universal tonalities and promote unimpeded
interchange; in this respect, the graphic nature of the work has acted
as one of its primary ambassadors. Perhaps Lettrism has followed the
most curious path: beginning largely in sound poetry, then branching off
into a political movement, Situationism, and an aesthetic movement that
focused more intently on interrelations of verbal and visual modes, it
has in some ways reversed the tendencies of other movements. If Lettrism
has become the most vital of the movements that have included the union
of word and image, it still has never owned the tendency. The need for
synthesis forms one of the grounding principals for movements in dynamic
phases, and remains with those that keep their energy, while becoming
suppressed in those that degenerate into fashionability or dogma.

To me, the need to integrate reaches for the roots of written
language and public performance. This impulse includes a searching of
the origins of art in previous ages. It also reflects the growing
globalism of culture in the 20th Century. The expansion and intersection
of cultures suggests the parochial nature of the English language and
the Roman alphabet. A global environment needs more than a single
alphabet and a single language to promote understanding and cooperation
between peoples. As useful and magnificent as the Roman alphabet can be,
it still cannot keep up with the complexities of the world in which we
now find ourselves. One of the alphabet's great strengths, and a reason
for its dominance of western culture for more than two millennia, is its
simplicity and its capacity to adjust to new situations. There's no need
to belittle that. In the contemporary world, however, there's no reason
why it can't be integrated with other modes, visual an auditory. The web
environment allows multiple configurations of media to function
together, with no necessity for competition between them. When the Web
became widely accessible, it made possible the inexpensive reproduction
of graphics, in monochrome and in color. I would not want to try to make
an anthology of any 20th Century art form that did not include visual
poetry. The web made such an anthology possible. In addition, the web
seems to have run something like a parallel course with visual poetry.
It, too, seeks means of universal communication and a reintegration of
modes of expression, and its polymath procedures run through all it
carries. If visual poetry does not break out of its bounds via literary
means, it may do so through the web itself. In any case, visual poetry
and the web seem ideally suited to each other, both reflecting a world
aching to go beyond the confines of isolated media. A problem for me
with the presentation of visual poetry has been the tendency to publish
or show it in separate venues, as a genre of its own. As far as I'm
concerned, separate is never equal, and my approach in publishing has
been to put it forward on an absolutely equal footing with other modes.
Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. On the web, you can
take both. In writing this essay, I've tried to avoid discussion of
individual entities at Light and Dust, because once I start talking
about any one of them it seems to pull the others along with it. I'll
make an exception here with Kaldron On-Line. For nearly two decades, the
print version of Kaldron had been the world's only pluralistic and
reliable venue for publishing this kind of work outside the mail art
network. It's important to note the emphases in this statement: other
magazines such as the Japanese Shi Shi ran longer and maintained
relative stability. However, it published little besides the work of
members of the Shi Shi group. Other venues put forth good work covering
a wide range, but only appeared briefly or at such erratic intervals
that no one could rely on them. Although Kaldron has been largely
forgotten or erased in the U.S. during the 1990s, it remained the
essential magazine, the main vehicle for news, for people practicing
visual poetries around the world, and it retains that position in the
minds of many practitioners outside the U.S. today. In the early 1990s,
editor Karl Kempton contemplated turning the print magazine's editorship
over to Amy Fraceschini and me. That didn't materialize in print form,
but I was able to move the magazine, with Karl still acting as an
editor, onto the web as the first of the Light and Dust partner sites.
Nearly all the visual poetry that came in through Light and Dust is
accessible from Kaldron's home page, and all visual poetry published by
Kaldron can be accessed from the general Light and Dust menu. Thus
anyone who wants to locate visual poetry only can go to the Kaldron
page, and those who want to see it more broadly contextualized can go to
the general menu or the menus of some of the other partner pages.

When I first began electronic publishing, my efforts went solely
toward making work conceived in other media available on the internet.
And so my efforts continued for the most part. In this respect, Light
and Dust acts primarily as a distribution system rather than an
exploration of art designed for the electronic environment. That was a
big enough job for me. As I assembled the site, however, many people
began working with properties of the web as part of the process of
making art. I have not been able to pursue this direction in poetry as
far as I would like, but I have been able to include the work of the two
early practitioners who have made the most of the medium, and this
satisfies my goal of presenting a full spectrum of the kinds of poetry
produced in the later 20th Century.

*

Okay, seven years later, with over 1,000 web pages placed
on-line, what does this electronic cousin of the Watts Towers add up to?
Well, I've fulfilled my basic goals in presenting a survey of late 20th
Century poetry and its cognates. And I've been able to present it in an
egalitarian and anti-sectarian manner. I've been able to publish work on
the web that I could not have afforded to do in print - considerably
more than I did in some twenty five years of producing books - and been
able to reach a much wider audience than I could ever hope to in any of
the media known to me before the advent of the web. I've been able to do
this with no resources beyond those of an average North American
university student in the 1990s. I've had no support from any funding or
legitimizing institution, and no backing from any clique or movement.
There may be a certain amount of vanity in my pointing this out. But one
of my goals goes considerably beyond this. After getting a sense of the
potentials of the web, I wanted to see how far I could go with next to
nothing to work with. If I can create an anthology that covers this much
ground, and averages 3,200 hits a day, anybody with a modest income and
a bit of determination can do likewise. Whether they set up pages simply
for themselves or go for something larger, we can create an anthology
which goes beyond all our limitations, and which satisfies the needs of
nearly all readers.

As to the nature of the medium that carries the ideal anthology that
I and other people have begun, there are all sorts of pundits ready to
praise and condemn it, and legions of prophets eager to tell whoever
listens where they think it's going and what it can achieve. Despite the
claims made all around, this goes beyond anyone's understanding or
clairvoyance. At present, for some the web lacks credibility, while
others see print as superseded. I feel sure that both these positions
can add up to nothing more than vaporware. Before the web became
available, I used to contemplate the environments of other periods when
media shifted. As things have worked out, I may have been on the
"bleeding edge" of a revolutionary change in communication, or perhaps
I've just been chasing flickering electrons that don't add up to much.
On a personal level, the web has given me a chance to get something like
a sense of what it might have been like to be a printer in the
incunabula period. Despite the variations in local color, theirs was a
world in which old certainties began to shake: enfranchisement and means
of communication were undergoing rapid expansion, and choruses rose
around the printers, proclaiming the value of their work in extending
the word of God or condemning it as the work of the devil. The first
printers had no way of knowing where their art would lead, but had their
fingers on the pulse of radical change too large for anyone to
comprehend. The web also seemed to have arrived at a time when one world
order was passing, and what follows it has not taken on apparent form or
direction.

In another age of transition, St. Augustine of Hippo saw the Roman
empire crumbling around him, and saw a greater Rome as an eternal
thought in the mind of God. It's difficult to imagine anyone
apotheosizing their city in such a manner today. But in secular terms,
the web as an anthology has the potential to become universal and
all-encompassing, something that goes beyond our individual limitations
without sacrificing our individuality in the process. It seems foolish
to claim eternal presence for anything we do: in all probability, the
web will change beyond recognition in less than a decade, and I doubt
that my site will last very long after I'm gone. But if electronic
technology follows the trajectory it's taken so far, whatever comes next
will have to build on what's there now. This may include loss of some of
the freedom the web enjoys at present, but its capacity for outreach can
only expand, and its participatory inclusiveness can only grow. The web
cannot become a single thought; but it can become universal. Following
what we now know of the brain's functions, its redundancies, backup
systems, and interchanges can follow the intricate and dynamic patterns
of contemplation rather than conclusion. It may continue as a form of
exploration rather than certainty. Poetry may fare better in such an
environment than it did in the 20th Century, though it may change beyond
recognition in the process.

Light and Dust in this context of constant change isn't mine: it's as
much yours as anyone else's.